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Monday, June 13, 2016

Mailbox Monday (06/13/16 edition)

Image licensed from bigstockphoto.com

Copyright stands

Mailbox Monday is hosted here. I've received a few new books recently:

The Hummingbird by Stephen P. KiernanReceived through TLC Book Tours

Deborah
Birch is a seasoned hospice nurse whose daily work requires courage and
compassion. But her skills and experience are tested in new and
dramatic ways when her easygoing husband, Michael, returns from his
third deployment to Iraq haunted by nightmares, anxiety, and rage. She
is determined to help him heal, and to restore the tender, loving
marriage they once had.

At the same time, Deborahs primary
patient is Barclay Reed, a retired history professor and expert in the
Pacific Theater of World War II whose career ended in academic scandal.
Alone in the world, the embittered professor is dying. As Barclay
begrudgingly comes to trust Deborah, he tells her stories from that
long-ago war, which help her find a way to help her husband battle his
demons.

Told with piercing empathy and heartbreaking realism, The Hummingbird is a masterful story of loving commitment, service to country, and absolution through wisdom and forgiveness.

Jefferson's America: The President, the Purchase, and the Explorers Who Transformed a Nation by Julie M. FensterReceived through Blogging for Books

The surprising
story of how Thomas Jefferson commanded an unrivaled age of American
exploration—and in presiding over that era of discovery, forged a great
nation.

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, as
Britain, France, Spain, and the United States all jockeyed for control
of the vast expanses west of the Mississippi River, the stakes for
American expansion were incalculably high. Even after the American
purchase of the Louisiana Territory, Spain still coveted that land and
was prepared to employ any means to retain it. With war expected at any
moment, Jefferson played a game of strategy, putting on the ground the
only Americans he could: a cadre of explorers who finally annexed it
through courageous investigation.

Responsible for orchestrating
the American push into the continent was President Thomas Jefferson. He
most famously recruited Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, who led the
Corps of Discovery to the Pacific, but at the same time there were other
teams who did the same work, in places where it was even more crucial.
William Dunbar, George Hunter, Thomas Freeman, Peter Custis, and the
dauntless Zebulon Pike—all were dispatched on urgent missions to map the
frontier and keep up a steady correspondence with Washington about
their findings.

But they weren’t always well-matched—with each
other and certainly not with a Spanish army of a thousand soldiers or
more. These tensions threatened to undermine Jefferson’s goals for the
nascent country, leaving the United States in danger of losing its
foothold in the West. Deeply researched and inspiringly told, Jefferson’s America
rediscovers the robust and often harrowing action from these seminal
expeditions and illuminates the president’s vision for a continental
America.

The Glorious Heresies by Lisa McInerneyReceived through LibraryThingOne messy murder
affects the lives of five misfits who exist on the fringes of Ireland's
post-crash society. Ryan is a fifteen-year-old drug dealer desperate not
to turn out like his alcoholic father Tony, whose obsession with his
unhinged next-door neighbour threatens to ruin him and his family.
Georgie is a prostitute whose willingness to feign a religious
conversion has dangerous repercussions, while Maureen, the accidental
murderer, has returned to Cork after forty years in exile to discover
that Jimmy, the son she was forced to give up years before, has grown
into the most fearsome gangster in the city. In seeking atonement for
the murder and a multitude of other perceived sins, Maureen threatens to
destroy everything her son has worked so hard for, while her actions
risk bringing the intertwined lives of the Irish underworld into the
spotlight . . .

Biting, moving and darkly funny, The Glorious Heresies explores salvation, shame and the legacy of Ireland's twentieth-century attitudes to sex and family.

The Secret Keeper by Kate MortonPurchased as my August book club selection

During a summer party at
the family farm in the English countryside, sixteen-year-old Laurel
Nicolson has escaped to her childhood tree house and is happily dreaming
of the future. She spies a stranger coming up the long road to the farm
and watches as her mother speaks to him. Before the afternoon is over,
Laurel will witness a shocking crime. A crime that challenges everything
she knows about her family and especially her mother, Dorothy—her
vivacious, loving, nearly perfect mother.

Now, fifty years later,
Laurel is a successful and well-regarded actress living in London. The
family is gathering at Greenacres farm for Dorothy’s ninetieth birthday.
Realizing that this may be her last chance, Laurel searches for answers
to the questions that still haunt her from that long-ago day, answers
that can only be found in Dorothy’s past.

Dorothy’s story takes
the reader from pre–WWII England through the blitz, to the ’60s and
beyond. It is the secret history of three strangers from vastly
different worlds—Dorothy, Vivien, and Jimmy—who meet by chance in
wartime London and whose lives are forever entwined. The Secret Keeper
explores longings and dreams and the unexpected consequences they
sometimes bring. It is an unforgettable story of lovers and friends,
deception and passion that is told—in Morton’s signature style—against a
backdrop of events that changed the world.